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Pickton murders: Bloody knife fight left one victim barely alive

There was only one Crown witness prepared to testify at Robert (Willie) Pickton's trial that she had been brutally attacked by the accused and lived to tell about it. Pickton was charged with attempted murder following the 1997 incident, but the charges were stayed because the Crown considered the woman too unstable to testify.

Photograph by: File
, Vancouver Sunn

There was only one Crown witness prepared to testify at Robert (Willie) Pickton's trial that she had been brutally attacked by the accused and lived to tell about it. Pickton was charged with attempted murder following the 1997 incident, but the charges were stayed because the Crown considered the woman too unstable to testify. At Pickton's 2007 murder trial, prosecutors argued the jury should hear the woman's evidence because it would help prove who killed the six victims on the indictment who, like her, were all drug-addicted sex-trade workers with a link to Pickton's farm. However, defence lawyers maintained that the woman, who they noted had a severe substance abuse problem and a criminal record that spanned two decades, attacked Pickton that night during a drug binge and that he was acting in self-defence. The trial judge ruled the jury should not hear her story, saying it was merely speculation that Pickton planned to murder and dismember her in the same fashion as the other victims. Even though the jury never heard her speak, the woman did take the stand twice during Pickton's pretrial hearings: during his 2003 preliminary hearing and a 2006 voir dire. Here is the story she previously told to police and in court (although its veracity has never been challenged or defended in open court):

The woman was working at the corner of Princess and Cordova late on the evening of March 22, 1997 when she said Robert (Willie) Pickton pulled up in a red pickup truck and asked her how much for oral sex.

"$40," replied the woman, who was then 30.

"How about a little more?" Pickton asked her.

He suggested she come to his place in Port Coquitlam, but she thought it was too far away.

He offered her $100 and said he would have her back downtown by 1 a.m. She accepted.

While sitting in the pickup truck, she saw a bra and asked Pickton whose it was. He said it belonged to a "working girl."

Just off the Mary Hill Bypass, the woman asked Pickton to pull over at a gas station so she could use the bathroom, but he indicated his place was nearby.

The woman recalls driving through the gate at 953 Dominion Ave., and going down a long driveway until they reached a trailer with a barking dog on the porch.

Pickton checked his messages on the answering machine, and then the woman followed him past the kitchen and into a bedroom.

"As we were going, I was just looking around, checking the place out. And the kitchen was "it was a pigsty" and I noticed a big butcher knife on the kitchen table 'cause it was just plain as day," she testified.

The woman said there was no bed in the back room, just a sleeping bag on the floor and a big roll of plastic that resembled a roll of carpeting.

"He went into his pocket, took out his wallet, handed me five 20s," she recalled.

The woman said she supplied a condom and they had sex for "all of five minutes" and then got dressed and returned to the entranceway.

After the sex, however, something went terribly wrong. The woman fled the farm bleeding profusely, with a handcuff attached to her wrist. Both she and Pickton were eventually treated in the same hospital for potentially life-threatening stab wounds.

The beginning and ending of the story is agreed upon by both the Crown and defence; it is what happened in between that remains unresolved. No jury has ever decided the issue because the woman wasn't allowed to testify at Pickton's trial.

After the sex, the woman asked Pickton if she could use the telephone, but he refused.

"He told me that other girls had made long-distance [calls], and he said he would stop at Mohawk, there was a pay phone there."

The woman went into the bathroom to inject a speedball ?a mixture of heroin and cocaine. But she said she missed the vein and didn't get high.

"When I came out, I asked him for a telephone book and he showed me a telephone book. And I was leaning over the desk looking up a phone number and I could feel ? feel him behind me."

The woman said she turned around and Pickton grabbed her left hand, caressed it and then slapped a handcuff on it.

"Then I just started fighting him. And then the first thing I remember was a knife on the kitchen table. So as I was fighting him, I was, like, going backwards so I could get to this knife, and then I reached for the knife.

"And then I leaped at him, I slit his throat.

"And then I remember him grabbing a rag and going, 'You f---ing bitch, you got me good,' and he put the rag on his neck. And then he had a big long stick and I remember just picking up plants, everything I could get a hold of and throwing it at him."

The woman said she tried to open the door and break a window to escape, but couldn't. At some point Pickton got the knife from her and stabbed her in the abdomen.

She said she must have blacked out at some point, because the next thing she remembers they were outside the trailer, standing beside his pickup truck. Pickton was holding her, she had the knife again in her right hand, and her left hand was split open.

"I was begging him to let me go, telling him I had a family and I told him I'd give $1,000 if he'd let me go."

The woman said she could feel all his weight coming down on her. "So I think he was going under, losing consciousness."

She recalled sliding out from under Pickton and staggering down the driveway. She ran across the road and knocked on the door of a neighbour's house but nobody answered. She tried to break the little window on the door with the knife and eventually smashed the picture window with her elbow.

Then she saw car lights approaching. At first she ducked, fearing it was Pickton coming after her, but she saw two heads in the car and recognized that one was a woman. The car drove to the end of the dead-end street, and turned around to drive past the house again.

"I smashed the other glass 'cause it was double ? double pane and I yelled, 'Help!'" the woman recalled. "And then they stopped and I went running out there."

The car's passenger, Maria Mills, told police in a statement read out in court that she recalled the woman "coming down the driveway -- sort of walking, staggering down the driveway -- and we heard, 'Help me, help me.'"

The car's driver, Brian Strilesky, told police: "She was covered in blood. She had a large kitchen type knife in her right hand and what appeared to be a handcuff on her left wrist. She pleaded for us to help her, that she had been stabbed."

Strilesky told the woman to drop the knife and put her in the back seat. "The girl was very concerned that she was going to be dying and she said, 'In case I die, tell them that I stabbed him in the neck,'" Strilesky told police.

The woman also pointed to Pickton's laneway, and said that was "where the accused lived," the witnesses told police.

She arrived by ambulance about 2 a.m. at Royal Columbian Hospital, where she was treated for two stab wounds to her abdomen, slashes to her hands and arms, and a knife wound to her right side, which had punctured her lung. She had lost three litres of blood and had no pulse.

Just over an hour later, Pickton was transferred to Royal Columbian from a smaller hospital, where he had driven himself. He had also lost three litres of blood, and had a large cut to the left side of his neck and to the top of his left arm.

Pickton was taken into a trauma room, where the handcuff key in his pants pocket was taken to the woman's operating room to remove the handcuffs still attached to her wrist.

According to the defence, the woman and Pickton were both slashed so badly that one or both of them could have died without medical intervention.

Defence lawyer Peter Ritchie maintained the woman had a "severe" 10-year cocaine and heroin addiction, and chronicled several run-ins with police and ambulance attendants, as well as episodes of bizarre and "psychotic" behaviour that could only be controlled by restraining her.

The defence contends that the woman did hit her vein with the speedball that night, after taking more drugs earlier in the day, and that she attacked Pickton with a knife because she was "going crazy" on a drug binge.

The woman told police shortly after the incident in 1997 that Pickton continued to try to hook the second handcuff to an object in the room, Ritchie said, rather than her right wrist. "He was trying to hook me to something and I just kept fighting. I was putting my elbow through his windows trying to get out, and he was holding his neck and I could see the blood gushing out. I was going at him, like trying to stab him some more. He gave up," Ritchie read from her police statement during a 2006 voir dire.

During a police interrogation following his arrest in the missing women case in 2002, Pickton told a police officer that he was trying to handcuff the woman to a door in self-defence and that she wanted the $3,500 he had in his pocket. (When police seized his clothes that night they noted he actually had $920 in his wallet.)

"I was gonna take her back [downtown] that same night but she went bananas. She went bananas," Pickton told the interrogator.

Two weeks after the knife-attack incident, Pickton was charged with attempted murder, assault with a weapon and forcible confinement. He told an undercover police officer posing as his cellmate in 2002 that he had been arrested, instead of the woman, because "I'm male."

However, all charges were stayed Jan. 27, 1998 because the woman was addicted to drugs and a Crown attorney thought she was too unstable to testify.

The woman, who was unconscious in hospital for four days after the knife attack, continued to struggle with her addictions for years.

She testified in 2003 that the attack had long-lasting effects on her and that she later had drug-induced flashbacks where she feared that "Willy" was after her. Twice, she said, she stole police cars in an attempt to flee the hallucinations and ended up in jail.

Because there had been no litigation in the courts to prove what happened between Pickton and the woman in 1997, Pickton's defence lawyer persuasively argued that it would be inappropriate for the woman to testify at the high-profile missing-women trial.

The trial judge, B.C. Supreme Court Justice James Williams, ultimately agreed, ruling the jury would never hear from the only Crown witness prepared to testify that she had been attacked by Pickton.

In a written ruling following the heated pretrial arguments, Williams decided the knife-attack incident could not be considered similar to what happened to the other women because there was no proof she was to be killed and dismembered following the knife attack. (All six of the women Pickton was convicted of killing were dismembered, and at least three of them were killed by gunshot wounds.)

"I find that there is simply not anywhere near the required degree of similarity to permit the conclusion that it is likely that the same individual committed both the 1997 incident and the murders of the six women," Williams wrote.

There was more to the woman's story that the jury at Pickton's 2007 trial also did not hear.

A police officer seized Pickton's clothes and rubber boots from the hospital that evening and they were left in an RCMP storage locked for more than seven years. After Pickton's arrest in the missing women case, the clothing was retrieved on June 28, 2004 and submitted for DNA testing.

Shockingly, the lab found evidence of two of the missing women -- Andrea Borhaven's DNA on the sole of Pickton's boots and Cara Ellis's on his jacket. Both women disappeared shortly before the knife-attack incident.

Pickton was charged with murdering Borhaven and Ellis, but the jury never heard about the clothing because these two women were not included in the 2007 trial. Charges involving Ellis, Borhaven and 18 other women were to be heard at a second trial, but those charges have now been stayed.

There was only one Crown witness prepared to testify at Robert (Willie) Pickton's trial that she had been brutally attacked by the accused and lived to tell about it. Pickton was charged with attempted murder following the 1997 incident, but the charges were stayed because the Crown considered the woman too unstable to testify.

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